An analysis of global conflicts and international events by the scrutiny of reason

Monthly Archives: May 2010

No intelligent eminent American would accept running as VP, least of all General Petraeus, with a by now politically bankrupt president as Obama, whose political stocks will be totally dwindled by 2012.

Steve Clemons speculation that Petraeus would accept such an offer by Obama if it was made stands in blatant contradiction to his own thinking. Only a few days ago he was flagging his much discussed post “…Sinking Obama Presidency” and presently he wants to place Petraeus on this sinking Titanic and the highly intelligent Petraeus would assent to take a ‘voyage’ that would lead to his own drowning. There is no “maybe” about such an event happening as Clemons muses and such a possibility would indeed be “crazy.”

Clemons has to make up his mind whether the Obama Presidency is sinking or floating.

The following was written a year ago and it was a reply to some commentators of the blog Open Salon.

By Con George-Kotzabasis

McGarrett’s strong medicine is for strong stomachs. But it’s most unlikely that the weak stomachs (read: of nipple-fed intellectuals) of the left will be able to digest it. His impartiality is irreproachable, as it ‘hits’ both lenders and borrowers with the Nemesis of the principles of the free market, a la Ludwig von Mises.

Paul J. O’Rourke

The free market is the best tested guide to long-term prosperity in an imperfectly made world. Even if it’s politically manipulated it still delivers the goods in comparison to a command dirigiste economy. Therefore one cannot equate the two. And even when it falls sick it recovers more by its own strength than by the intervention of the state “doctor”, even if paradoxically he presents himself in the form of the liberal Hayek as you argue in your interesting piece on your blog. But certainly, as you correctly point out, the free market if it’s impeded by the “panaceas” of government intervention has the “freedom to do harm.” But whom does it harm other than the economically imprudent and those that cannot ‘Guard that solvency,’ to quote you?

To your contention that ‘This overly free mixture of political and market manipulation literally stole your property,’ I would add that this property was bought with “stolen” money provided by those two magnificent, replete with fairness and justice, liberal “constructions” of Fannie and Freddie.

Some have noticed, that whenever Clemons posts a ‘provocative’ post such as the present one “Grotesque Nationalism” presumably for the purpose of bringing into port the spiritually and cognitively leaking armada of anti-America Americans and anti-free marketeers, who are too scared and cowardly, and spiritually and intellectually too enfeebled, to be motivated to sail into the Schumpeterian heavy seas of “creative destruction,” and makes a bungle of an apparently serious post he stands to be corrected. And as ever with such posts it’s the resourceful, doughty, and politically and historically savvy American Jewess, Nadine, who corrects him, and so many others, like Dan Kervick, who in another post being intellectually disabled to give a serious answer to Nadine’s unassailable facts that Israel is engaged in defensive wars and not in expansive wars as Kervick claims, and whom Nadine accuses of being a “disgrace” to Western civilization. And to this accusation Kervick deploys a queasy defence by saying that for eighteen years he taught the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Ockham, Leibniz, Hume, and Russel, as if such philosophic pedigree absolves him from his incompetence to answer cogently Nadine’s argument.

Why Clemons is in need to fall back from the total failure of “high octane socialism” to even the weakest low octane version of socialism in the face of a brilliant constellation of economists, such as Amartya Sen of Britain, who cogently argue that it was capitalism, with all its shortcomings that Adam Smith himself noted, in the last hundred years that has substantially decreased relative poverty and has incrementally increased the standard of living of the masses. In any version socialism has proven to be an irreversibly bankrupt policy.

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Critics of the War

The Liberal political courtesans Paul Krugman, Maureen Dowd and Frank Rich, not to mention the less charming ones of the New York Times, provocatively egged on by their young 'madam' Arthur Sulzberger, are transforming the sweetness of their profession into the bitterness of their politics against the war.

"If the leader is filled with high ambition and if he pursues his aims with audacity and strength of will, he will reach them in spite of all obstacles."
Karl Von Clausewitz